- In fanfiction you can write stories set in someone else’s universe that you didn’t invent to be exploitable, a universe which readers nonetheless aren’t pre-blinded to the way they’re blinded to the opportunities and horrors of real life. Furthermore, your readers will know that many readers of canon accepted the background inadequacy as something that wasn’t out of character for human beings and their civilizations. “Unrealistic, you say? Did you leap out of your chair and yell ‘Nobody in real life would do that!’ while you were reading canon? You did? Well, literally millions of other readers didn’t.”
In HPMOR, I can point to Azkaban and say “Because it is there.” Just like how, in our own universe, it is not my personal outlook on life to believe that governments would sell and advertise lottery tickets, even after the introduction of lotteries had been shown to cause an average 3% reduction in spending on food by low-income families. That is not me making a great display of how cynical I am about politicians; it is a fact that I could toss into an Earthfic as a background truth without needing to justify it. In HPMOR I get to say the same thing about Cornelius Fudge, albeit the source is Rowling and not reality. The important thing is that the civilizational inadequacy is given to me, and not depicted by me as my own statement.
- And so there are stories you can tell in fanfiction that you can’t easily tell in any other mode of literature, because in fanfiction the reader knows that you didn’t create the problems the hero faces.
This is a very, very good point. I would have been hard-pressed to name an advantage inherent to fanfiction over other forms of literature until now. (At least, to name one that didn't come with its own set of disadvantages.)
Part 2 Previously Someday someone will realize how worth-reading these are. EDIT: I want to say it was Cumol and possible elizabeth who have been reading HPMOR? These contain some SPOILERS to pretty late in the story, but once you finish, his blog is a great read.
Yeah, I'm hooked to HPMOR thanks to you :) Harry Potter is sooo annoying when he's all rational! In the original series he's really humble but in HPMOR he thinks that he's so much superior than everyone else I want to strangle him. But i love the series nonetheless.
(Don't read this if you don't want to. Seriously.) At the risk of belaboring the point, let's talk about this if you want. In the original series, Harry is a dull, formless character whose primary qualities are bravery, love and loyalty. Those are flat, author-given characteristics that can't ever really change or grow. I love the books, but not because of his character; it's good for what it is, but never great. He is also humble, for environmental reasons. In HPMOR, Harry is interesting. As EY talks about in his most recent post, his Harry "exploits" a perfectly valid, exogenous part of the narrative, by having a fair amount of scientific knowledge (but nothing outrageous, not for a smart, interested 11 year old with the right parents) and also being exposed to magic without preconceptions. These are two extremely acceptable narrative points. They require essentially no suspension of belief. If, hypothetically, I had been put in EY's Harry's shoes at that age I would have proceeded to do exactly what Harry does in the story. So would most curious people; it's almost self-evident. (I mean: test magic, experiment, feel disgust for various social institutions, try to convince children they don't need to be bigots.) In that sense, the sense of having different priors to work with and so on, Harry is quite superior to everyone in the story except (somewhat) his antagonist. He acts like it, often too much. That's one of his failings. If he was perfectly humble, there's an argument to be made that everything would be way too easy for him. EY is adding difficulty to the story. Otherwise he'd already have the army of friends that JKR's Harry built when he finally realized he needed one, at the age of 16. And have you ever met a truly brilliant, prodigal 11 year old, who was humble? I haven't. Sorry to jump down your throat and I certainly don't mean to; I love that you're enjoying it. But saying you have to work around a characteristic of the protagonist to enjoy the story ("nonetheless") implies that in all the literature you read, you want all of the protagonists to be perfect, or at least align with your idea of perfection. Protagonists (and 11 year olds) are allowed to be know-it-alls, have few social skills, be annoying. It'd be weirder if EY's Harry wasn't. But it's a common criticism; I only rarely bother to explain my perspective on it -- I feel like I can trust hubski.Harry Potter is sooo annoying when he's all rational! In the original series he's really humble but in HPMOR he thinks that he's so much superior than everyone else I want to strangle him.
Oups, I guess I just didn't express myself properly. I'm frustrated with HP the same way I probably would if I would talk to 11 years old me ( I was such a brat!). I like that I don't like him because it feels like i'm supposed not to like him. I do find him way more interesting then the original HP but I also want to slap him across the face sometimes. But if he was perfect and humble, you're right that the series would just be boring and not worth reading. I wonder if JK Rowling ever read HPMOR and what she would think of it.
Depending on how far you are, you will probably go from not particularly liking him to admiring nearly every facet of his character. Maybe. Maybe not. As far as Rowling goes, EY has received explicit permission from her ... legal entity/agents/company/whatever to write HPMOR, because unlike normal fanfiction, there's money involved tangentially. I doubt she's read it. In past interviews, she's basically said that fanfiction is pretty cool, she likes what she's inspired, but also that a lot of it is creepy and awful. Never commented on an individual story that I know of.
I read his level-2-characters piece first, and I found it a better read than this one. Sometimes he seems quite high up on his horse: ...yeah, one of my best friends is a gold medalist for the IMO, and while he is enviably smart, he's also just a person, not some super-intelligence that I am honored to have around. This was pretty funny though:
Yes, I’ve been known to pull off implausible tricks like “Write a Harry Potter fanfiction good enough to recruit International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists”
but come on, Dementors are flying corpses that nothing can kill or destroy and that can only be fended off by happy thoughts in the form of animals.
Oh, please, you can't take him too seriously. And -- you may not know anything about EY or HPMOR, I don't know, but one day about, god, four or five years ago now? he decided to write a spinoff of Harry Potter in order to drum up donations for his research institute. On a whim. Having never written anything longer than six chapters in his life. Now it's got about 15000 favorites on fanfiction.net, which is the most ever, I believe.
I disagree, for two reasons: one, Yudkowsky can write. Really well. He's written other short fiction, he's written five thousand word essays on ethical relativism, on whatever -- and it's all uniformly fascinating. He has voice or flair or style or whatever the English teachers are calling "it" these days. Two, of the ~million Harry Potter fanfictions that exist, 1 percent of 1 percent are of professional quality, and that's still quite a few stories. Not many, perhaps, and it takes a long time to find them, but they're there. Of course, those stories aren't usually the ones with the most reviews on fanfiction.net, which is a kind of shitty website anyway -- which is what makes HPMOR so surprising.